The Open House (20 page)

This was why, on his way upstairs (and not perhaps without a touch of that hazardous attitude known to students of Greek drama as
hubris
), he paused to confirm himself in the view that the flowing curves around him could represent the conception only of Robert Adam himself. The constable who had been detailed to guide him to Mrs Anglebury watched this gesture of connoisseurship with respect. He was no doubt under the impression that the great man was looking for fingerprints or blood-stains in unexpected places.

Professor Beddoes Snodgrass’ devoted care of Ledward Park, and his anxiety that it should present itself as a going concern to his nephew Adrian upon whatever birthday anniversary he should choose to turn up, had not extended to giving an appearance of present occupation to the secondary bedrooms of the house. In the chamber in which Mrs Anglebury was resting everything rollable had been rolled up, everything swathable swathed, and everything baggable tied firmly into bags. Cats in bags, Appleby thought as he glanced around. Enormous cats in enormous bags, waiting to be let out. And he wondered whether the lady had, as it were, a further cat in a bag tucked up her sleeve.

She was reclining on a bare mattress, but had been provided with an eiderdown quilt, plenty of pillows, and a cheerful-looking electric fire. And if she didn’t herself look cheerful, at least she looked calm. She might also have been described as remaining more handsome than ravaged. Adrian Snodgrass’ way with women had doubtless been reprehensible. But his taste had been good.

‘Good morning,’ Appleby said. ‘My name is Appleby. You may recall that we met last night.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Appleby’s words, which had struck him as absurd even as he uttered them, didn’t seem to discompose Mrs Anglebury in the least. ‘Not when I was on top of a bed, as I am now, but when I was under one. Did I tell you I had killed Adrian?’

‘Yes, Mrs Anglebury, you did.’

‘I get things wrong sometimes. I rather think I got that wrong.’

‘You will find others who agree with you in that.’

‘Because, you know,
why
was I under the bed? I must have been hiding from Adrian. In other words, it was Adrian who was trying to kill me. Which clears the matter up.’

‘As a matter of fact, you said at the time that you were hiding from some men. Not from Adrian, Mrs Anglebury. From some men you didn’t like the look of. And you weren’t imagining them. You really did see them. I myself saw them too.’ Although thus expressing things as simply as he could, Appleby found himself without much hope of making any progress with David Anglebury’s mother. For here in front of him was something not in the least like the wayward battiness and obscure wilfulness or disingenuousness of the aged Professor Snodgrass. Mrs Anglebury was insane. It had been absurd of Dr Plumridge to suggest that a layman, whatever degree of mental eccentricity his career had brought him in contact with, could get anything useful out of her.

‘For a long time,’ Mrs Anglebury continued, ‘Adrian was simply trying to have me put away. He had enlisted powerful support. The Prime Minister was in the plot. And of course – and as you might guess – the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Monsieur Picasso stood out. It was very much to his credit. They wanted him to paint me so that I should look mad, and then they were going to show the painting to the Queen. I was to have two eyes in the middle of my left cheek. This would have the effect of making me look strange. But I foiled all their attempts. That is why Adrian started trying to kill me.’ She paused, and smoothed the eiderdown over her knees. ‘Do I make myself clear?’

‘I think it may be said that you do.’ Appleby was by now simply wondering how he could retrieve this painful false step and get away. For here was a degree of helpless alienation which it was merely indecent to intrude upon.

‘Adrian and I were married,’ Mrs Anglebury said, ‘on the 21st of January 1953, in the parish church of St Botolph’s, Oxford.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Appleby, who had seated himself at a cautious remove from the demented lady, sat up with a jerk. ‘Do I understand…’

‘It was because of its being a runaway match.’ Mrs Anglebury had been heedless of interruption. ‘And Adrian, you see, was very fond of Oxford – although his career there had not been so successful as that of his half-brother Basil, whom I have no doubt that you know. And of course the Vicar of St Botolph’s, who performed the ceremony, was an old friend of Adrian’s. In fact, he had been the chaplain of his college. The Reverend Frederick Templeman, MA.’

‘I see. Do you recall whether the banns were called in a regular way, or whether the marriage was by special…’

‘Yes, by special licence. It was from the Archbishop of Canterbury.’

‘Never mind about the Archbishop,’ Appleby said hastily. ‘And what happened then?’

‘Then? We set out on a short wedding-journey on the continent. But, no – that is not quite correct. We were
about
to set out on such a journey. To Venice. We had neither of us ever been to Venice.’

‘And then something disconcerting happened?’

‘Disconcerting? I don’t think so.’ Mrs Anglebury shook her head vaguely. It was as if she were losing interest in the discussion. ‘I wonder whether it is possible to ring for early morning tea in this hotel?’

‘Well, there is a respectable person – a Mrs Gathercoal – who I hope may be induced to bring you some. But you were telling me about your marriage.’

‘Was I? Charles and I were married – if my memory is correct – in the spring of 1953.’

‘Your memory is certainly correct. But we were speaking of your marriage not to Charles Anglebury, but to Adrian Snodgrass.’

‘That wasn’t a marriage at all.’ Mrs Anglebury’s voice had changed suddenly; it was as if she was back in the region she had been inhabiting when this strange conversation opened. ‘Not a marriage at all,’ she repeated. ‘Mr Templeman, you see, hadn’t been Mr Templeman – only some wicked friend of Adrian’s. It had all been contrived so that I might be undone.’ Mrs Anglebury paused on this archaic word, and appeared to take satisfaction in it. ‘Undone,’ she repeated.

‘This is something you remember discovering shortly after what you thought had been a true wedding ceremony?’

‘I didn’t discover it. Adrian told me.’

‘After you had been living together for a little time? After a quarrel, perhaps?’

‘Perhaps after a quarrel. But I think perhaps it was after I had been having some of my funny turns. He didn’t like them.’

‘Mrs Anglebury, I wonder whether I have got this right? Adrian simply told you that you were not legally his wife, that he had no intention of making you so, and that you had better clear out, keep quiet, and manage as best you could?’

‘Yes. Of course, it was all long before he started wanting to kill me. Or was it that I started wanting to kill him? I think you and I were talking about that. But I forget.’

‘Never mind that for a moment. There is something I want to know.’ Appleby had stood up, and was now standing over Mrs Anglebury as if a further brief sanity could be compelled upon her by sheer effort of will. ‘After your…your relationship with Adrian Snodgrass – with David’s father – broke up, did you ever see Adrian again?’

‘Oh, yes. But only once. It was when David was a small boy. Adrian must have been staying at Ledward. That’s the Snodgrasses’ family place, and I don’t think it can be far from this hotel… I wonder if you would be so kind as to ring for that tea?’

‘It will be coming very soon. You say you encountered Adrian?’

‘Yes. I was walking in the park at Ledward. It is something I sometimes do. And somebody was shooting rabbits, or perhaps it was pigeons. It turned out to be Adrian.’ Mrs Anglebury’s limbs were now moving restlessly, spasmodically beneath the eiderdown. ‘We talked.’

‘Was David mentioned?’

‘Yes – because, you see, somehow or other Adrian had met him. I think he had liked him very much.’

‘Yes?’

‘But not me. I could feel that I horrified him. I can’t think why. But it was almost as if it was the way I talked.’

There was a silence. It represented Appleby seeking cautiously for words. He was on the verge – but only on the verge – of confirming his own strangest notion of the Ledward affair.

‘Mrs Anglebury – how did the conversation end?’

‘It was about something being mended.’ Mrs Anglebury’s head moved strangely. She might have been trying to see round the corner of a veil, a darkness, a mist. ‘No. It was about something that couldn’t be mended.’

‘Never?’

‘Not in Adrian’s lifetime – or at least not for years ahead. He said that one day he might become a stronger man than he was then. But of course he
was
strong. He liked to show it sometimes with the men – tossing sheaves or hauling at a rope. So it must have been something
really
difficult to mend. Do you think it might have had to do with a tractor, or with one of the bridges over the River Ledward where it runs through the park?’

‘These are obviously possibilities. But did Adrian say anything more about it?’

‘He said something about papers. That there were papers securely tucked away at Ledward which would put things straight one day.’

‘I see.’ Appleby stood up as he uttered these far from idle words. ‘I’m bound to say that Adrian Snodgrass strikes me as a penitent of a distinctly procrastinating sort.’

‘I wonder whether David has caught the burglars.’

‘What’s that?’ It had been for his own satisfaction that Appleby had uttered his last grim reflection, and he had been obliged to recall himself to Mrs Anglebury with a jerk. ‘What was that you said?’

‘David was with me here until a few minutes before you arrived. But then this man came in and whispered to him. I think I wasn’t supposed to hear. But I did.’

‘What man was this, Mrs Anglebury? Try to tell me.’

‘I don’t know. But he said he knew who the burglars were, and he and David could corner them on their own if they were quick. So he took David away.’

‘You are sure this whispering man was a stranger to you?’

‘Well, not quite. I mean he did seem vaguely familiar.’

‘It wasn’t Professor Snodgrass?’

‘Oh, no. I should know Professor Snodgrass at once. Even if he suddenly turned up in this hotel.’

‘A man stinking of soap and heaven knows what?’

‘I shouldn’t notice. I smoke too much. Have you any cigarettes?’

‘No, I have not. Try to remember anything more.’

‘There wasn’t anything more – except that the man took David into a corner of the room where I couldn’t hear what he said. Or only the bit about the park.’

‘And what was that?’

‘That he knew the crooks had a hide-out there, and would be lying low until they could get away. And David nodded, and they both ran out of the room.’

‘Damnation!’ Uttering this surprising expletive, Appleby strode first to the bedroom door, where he flicked off the lights, and then swiftly to the window. Heavy curtains had been drawn across it, and he flung these back and gazed out.

A thin grey light of dawn hovered in the park – a light still so faint that it might have been no more than a slow evaporation from the grey moisture of the grass. It would almost have been possible to interpret these scant visual evidences as a seascape in which a single dark tree showed like a becalmed galleon with inken sails presaging doom. But the sea was parting even as Appleby looked; it was rolling itself up into shapeless bundles as if in imitation of the swathed and shrouded objects inside this room; in places these little bundles were beginning to move with the slow deliberation of grazing sheep, or to disintegrate and fade like small clouds unable to withstand the sun. But there was as yet no sun here. For as much as another half-hour, perhaps, the park at Ledward would be a theatre of opening and closing vistas, drifting vapours, obstinately lingering shades.

Appleby threw open the window, and for a moment stood listening. Seemingly far away – although it might not be far away at all – he thought he heard voices calling: the voices, perhaps, of two men who had lost contact with each other and were seeking to regain it.

Without so much as pausing to shut the window again, Appleby turned and ran from the room.

There were no thoughts of Robert Adam in Appleby’s head this time as he tumbled himself dangerously down the elegant main staircase of Ledward Park. In the hall he scribbled a note and then shouted directions to a policeman, but didn’t pause to see with what speed this mustered support behind him. He had no doubt whatever of the particular dire hazard which had suddenly presented itself, and no disposition to deny that in his assessment of the situation he had failed to take account of the one bizarre possibility that might lead to it. So it was very much up to him to move quickly now.

When he emerged from the house it was momentarily into an effect of darkness, but this was only because he had been passing once more through that oppressively over-illuminated interior. As his vision accommodated itself he saw that the columns of the great portico outside the front door stood dark against a sky faintly flushed with rose, and as he dropped down the elaborately balustraded stone steps to the level of the gardens and the drive he received an impression that daylight was farther advanced than he had supposed.

But there was another factor at work, and of this he became aware as soon as he had negotiated a ha-ha and entered the park itself. The morning mist which from the height of Mrs Anglebury’s window had suggested no more than the thickness of a blanket on the ground was in fact a shifting and opaque integument in places more than head-high. And the little fleecy sheep which had appeared to move grazing over the surface of this chilly pasture were tall enough to envelop whole trees for a time in a magic cloak of invisibility.

Appleby paused to listen. In these conditions – familiar only to those who go abroad at dawn – sound might be muted too, and any quarter from which it did come not easy to be certain of. But at least he did again hear voices, although they sounded far away. So he set off again at a run. There was now a broad stream on his left hand. Presumably it was the River Ledward to which Mrs Anglebury had referred in one of her more rambling moments. A couple of herons were standing in the water; their heads rotated with the suggestion of some malign scanning mechanism as they watched Appleby go by. He turned his own head and glanced behind him. There was no sign of any of Stride’s men.